


the devil at the crossroads

by stelleappese



Category: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Guns, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 08:00:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,088
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20224477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stelleappese/pseuds/stelleappese
Summary: Deckardwantsto lower the gun. But he knows danger when it's staring at him in the face.





	the devil at the crossroads

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the prompt "Brixton/Shaw au drabble where Shaw joins Eteon for Reasons" :P

The door is ajar.

Deckard stands there, frozen on the spot, keys in hand, holding a bag of takeout food. The peaceful, exhausted post-mission statics in his brain are immediately replaced with blaring sirens. He sets the food down, stuffs the keys in his pocket, and reaches for his gun. His entire body is tense and ready, his ears ring dully.

He thinks of retribution, first. Something he and his team have done, someone they've killed, or ruined, or sent to prison. But nobody apart from his men and his direct superior knows of this safe house, and Deckard has learned, in seventeen years of work, to cover his tracks down to the smallest details.

The next thing he thinks, flattening himself against the wall and glancing through the thin opening and into the corridor, is that they've become dangerous to the British army. It's entirely possible something they've done, something illegal, something reprehensible, something that would ruin the careers of politicians and generals, has come to light, and they need to be disposed of. But that, too, sounds implausible. Why wait for them to be on their way home? Why not blow them up during a mission, have a perfectly reasonable explanation to give friends and family?

There is a mirror in the corridor, and reflected in it are a pair of boot-clad feet, sticking out of the archway to the living-room. 

There is one last thing, one last option. Deckard elects not to consider it until he's seen what's hiding inside the safe house.

*

The younger cadets used to joke about him, when they were feeling brave enough; most of the time, they whispered instead. Some Scottish kid told Brixton about Shaw's very first real mission, about how he survived the slaughter of his entire team, disobeyed direct orders to abort mission, and only came limping back to his commanding officer after he'd managed to kill every single one of the hostiles involved. Another kid, a red-head with a posh accent, said he'd met him in the showers once, and his back had been riddled with scars. Someone else said he was told Shaw once blew up a whole building just to get to one single man, some terrorist or drug lord or whatever.

When he finally met him, Deckard wasn't what Brixton had pictured.  
If you looked close enough, it was pretty clear he was still a kid. Hidden underheath his straight back and cold eyes was something inequivocably soft; a pout of his lips, an unsure little frown, a remnant of roundness in his face. And he was _tiny_; a wiry, tense little thing.   
With nothing to do between missions, most of the time Deckard would be following around his commanding officer, waiting to be told what to do. There was something in that, too, that made him look more vulnerable than what most people around Brixton let on. He was, Brixton had come to realize, terribly eager to please.

The other side of him manifested itself in no time, though. Almost a week later, Brixton witnessed Deckard beat a man to a pulp in a pub. Or rather, he witnessed Deckard throw a man out of a window, follow him out with what looked like the thick wooden leg of a chair or table, and start pummeling him with it. He was told, later on, that Deckard had been drinking alone when the man decided he didn't like his face and attacked him, thought that knowledge did nothing to wipe the memory of it from Brixton's brain. It did, in particular, not wipe out the image of Deckard straightening up, realizing someone was watching, and turning to look straight at Brixton. He'd had blood on his face and a look in his eyes that made Brixton believe every single rumor about him. He'd let his weapon fall on the ground and had walked past Brixton, eyes still fixed on him.

Brixton didn't get much sleep that night, staring at the ceiling from his bunk bed and wondering if there was something wrong about him, because he'd never been that turned on in his entire life. 

*

Four out of five of Deckard's men are dead, their bodies scattered around the flat. One was shot through the back of the head while he sat at the kitchen table; his blood fresh enough to be dripping lazily onto the floor. One is lying on the other side of an upturned armchair; another, the one whose feet Deckard saw, has had his head smashed in against the wall before being discarded. The fourth one is on the floor at Brixton's feet, his head turned at an unnatural angle.

The fifth is standing near the fireplace, at ease, observing Deckard as he slowly enters the room, his gun drawn on him.

"Hello, Deckard." Brixton says, softly.  
Deckard swallows, or tries to. Every fiber of his body tells him to lower his gun: it's _Brixton_, after all. Deckard has known him for fifteen years. He saved Deckard's life at least as many times as Deckard saved his. He knows Deckard so intimately, every ugly, horrifying, mangled bit of him; Brixton has seen everything about Deckard there is to see, and none of it made him turn his back to him. Deckard _wants_ to lower the gun. But he knows danger when it's staring at him in the face.

*

It took a while for Deckard to reappear, chastised and moody. He sat alone in the mess hall, poking his food with a fork, and Brixton walked straight to him and sat down on the opposite side of the table. He deliberately ignored the gasps from some of his mates and started eating his food. Deckard gave him a curious look, but said nothing. Just like the day after, and the one after that, and the one after that. After more or less two weeks, Shaw asked him if he wanted to train with him, and Brixton likes to think he did a good job of hiding the triumph from his voice when he accepted.

In the five months Deckard spent in England before being sent off to his next mission, Brixton learned a few things about him. He learned the murderous look in his eyes was more wariness than a prelude to violence; he learned he spent most of his free time in or around the base because he had a strained relationship with a tyrannical father; he learned that, more than anything else, Deckard had absolutely nowhere he belonged.

What took longer to learn, and only came after Deckard had been assigned command of his own team, and had handpicked Brixton to be his second in command, was that once Deckard decided he trusted someone, he trusted them _completely._

*

"What is going on?"  
He wanted his voice to sound dangerous, but it doesn't come out quite right.  
Brixton's gun is in plain sight on the coffee table. He's not doing anything to get closer to it, an he's not looking around for any alternative weapon. His posture is not threatening at all, either. He's just waiting.  
"Will you let me explain?" Brixton asks.  
"It better be fucking good," Deckard says, and it sounds like he's begging.

It's the look in Brixton's eyes that's fucking him up. He's looking at Deckard with such _softness._ He's surrounded by corpses, he's a traitor in every possible acceptation of the word. And yet, he's looking at Deckard like he's the one and only thing he cares about.

"You've heard of Eteon." Brixton says.  
"I'm going to shoot you," Deckard answers, "Thirty seconds, and I will shoot you."  
"They want to make this world a better place. They want to make _us_ better. And they have the tools to do it, Deck, they _can_ fix all of it."

Deckard shoots. Once, twice, straight into Brixton's chest. Brixton slams against the fireplace and flops on the floor. It takes him a long moment to make himself breathe again, and the first thing he does when he manages to get some air in his lungs is laugh.

"Have your lost your fucking mind?" Deckard shouts at him, not even bothering to hide the streak of unadulterated desperation in his voice.  
"I'm serious, Deck." Brixton says. He groans as he straps off his bulletproof vest and struggles out of it. "Look around. How many times have we risked our lives at the whims of weak men? How much of our lives has been decided for us by people who thought they were better than us, when all of their power came from a title?"  
He grabs hold of a nearby armchair to haul himself up.  
"Stay down," Deckard hisses.  
"You won't shoot me." Brixton says, lightly.   
"Why are you so sure of that?" Deckard mutters.  
Brixton gives him a long, intense look.   
"You know why." he says.

*

It was Brixton who kissed him first, pumped full of adrenaline after a near death experience, slamming Deckard against a wall as the world around them trembled and roared.  
He'd expected Deckard to knee him in the balls, but he'd just looked confused instead.

He'd asked Brixton, a few days later, why he'd done it. Brixton had had no answer to that, apart from "I wanted to," but Deckard didn't seem satisfied with that. 

Brixton knows, even now, that there are things Deckard will never tell him. He never told him who the man he was seeing back when Brixton first kissed him was, nor did he tell him what had happened to him the day he marched into Brixton's room, ordered his roommates out, locked the door behind him, grabbed Brixton by the collar of his shirt and kissed him. He'd dragged him to the closest bed (which was _not_ Brixton's, by the way,) tugged and pulled until Brixton was on top of him. There was such urgency in his movements, such desperation.

Brixton may not have known exactly what had happened to Deckard, but he knew what he was doing underneath him, grinding against him, biting at Brixton's throat. He wanted Brixton's hand on him to erase the memory of somebody else touching him.

He's never been good at lying to himself, Brixton; as he lay next to Deckard in the too-small bed, head still buzzing with post-coital bliss, he grudgingly admitted that the vulnerability he had triumphantly recognized in Deckard a few years before was something they shared: he was ready to be the rebound, if it meant he could have Deckard for himself for a little while.

And yet, after months, then years; after dragging each other out of the jaws of death over and over again, after hands pressed on wounds to stop the bleeding, after nights curled up close to each other without talking... Brixton watched as Deckard shed his old life like a skin too tight for him to wear; he watched his melancholy and loneliness slowly be replaced with genuine friendships, he watched him learn to laugh at silly jokes, join in on the banter with their fellow soldiers. Brixton watched Deckard turn a page of his life, leave everything behind. But he did keep Brixton at his side.

*

Deckard watches as Brixton steadies himself up. He's got a hand pressed to his chest, where Deckard's bullets hit the bulletproof vest, and another one outstretched, as if Deckard is some dangerous animal he needs to soothe.

"You know what this society has done to us," Brixton says, slowly taking a step forward, "Our families, our government. The first abandoned us, the other used us. How much longer do you think they'll put up with us, uh? With all we know, all we've done in their name?"  
"Stop," Deckard says. It comes out as barely a whisper.  
"That's what you thought, isn't it? Before you came in. You thought: 'They're getting rid of us.'"  
Deckard's mouth snaps shut. Brixton smiles at him.  
"All of this," he murmurs, taking another step, "Eteon, a new world... All of it would only make sense if you're with me. We're brothers, you and I. We belong together."

He's close enough, now, to rest a hand on Deckard's right arm.

"We've been running since we were boys. We went from the rule of fathers to the rule of generals and politicians and bureaucrats. Let's make our own rules. Let's build our own world."

He leads Deckard's right arm down along his side, and Deckard lets him. And when he leans in to kiss him, Deckard kisses him back.


End file.
